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Four boys butchered – the cost of spurning efforts for peace in the Middle East

Opinion: No democracy is immune to running an undemocratic system of oppression in territory under its control

Vile killings: a demonstration demanding military action against Hamas, which Benjamin Netanyahu has blamed – without producing evidence – for the murder of three Israeli teens. Photograph:Epa/Abir Sultan

‘Israel is a state of law and everyone is obligated to act in accordance with the law,” the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said after the abduction and murder of a Palestinian teenager shot in an apparent revenge attack for the killing last month of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank.

He called the killing of Muhammad Abu Khdeir in East Jerusalem “abominable”. President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority has denounced the murder of the three Israelis, one of them also an American citizen, in the strongest terms.

What to make of this latest flare-up in the blood feud of Arab and Jew in the Holy Land, beyond revulsion at the senseless loss of four teenagers’ lives? What to make of the hand-wringing of the very leaders who have chosen to toss nine months attempts at diplomatic mediation by the US into the rubbish and now reap the fruits of their fecklessness?

Sometimes words, any words, appear unseemly because those who perpetuate the conflict relish the attention they receive – all the verbal contortions of would-be peacemakers who insist, in their quaint doggedness, that reason can win out over revenge and biblical revelation.

Still, Israel, a state of laws within the pre-1967 lines, is not a state of law beyond them in the occupied West Bank, where Israeli dominion over millions of Palestinians, now almost a half-century old, involves routine coercion, humiliation and abuse, to which most Israelis have grown increasingly oblivious.

What goes on beyond a long-forgotten Green Line tends to impinge on Israeli consciousness only when violence flares. Otherwise it is over the wall or barrier (choose the word that suits your politics) in places best not dwelled upon.

But those places come back to haunt Israelis, as the vile killings of Eyal Yifrach, Naftali Fraenkel and Gilad Shaar demonstrate. Netanyahu, without producing evidence, has blamed Hamas. The sweeping Israeli response in the West Bank has already seen at least six Palestinians killed, about 400 Palestinians arrested and much of the territory placed in lockdown. Reprisals have extended to Gaza. Palestinian militants there have fired rockets and mortar rounds into southern Israel in response.

This is not what happens in a state of laws. Beyond the Green Line lies a lawless Israeli enterprise profoundly corrosive, over time, to the noble Zionist dream of a democracy governed by laws.

All four killings took place in territory occupied or annexed by Israel since 1967. Here the law has taken second place to the Messianic claims of religious nationalists who believe Jews have a God-given right to all the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. Their view holds sway, even if it is not the view of most Israelis.

No democracy can be immune to running an undemocratic system of oppression in territory under its control. To have citizens on one side of an invisible line and subjects without rights on the other side of that line does not work. A democracy needs borders; Israel’s slither into military rule for Palestinians in occupied areas where there is no consent of the governed.

As for the Palestinian Authority, so-called, it is weak, and the Palestinian national movement is still riven with division beneath a “unity government” that cannot even pay salaries in Gaza.

This situation may be sustainable because power lies overwhelmingly with Israel. But it is sustainable only at the cost of the violence now flaring. This is the future. Absent a two-state peace agreement, revenge will win out over law. Violence is not an aberration. It is the logical consequence of an aberrational order susceptible to lynch mobs, whether Arabs or Jews.

Most Israelis and Palestinians want peace. They do not want their children dying this way. But their leaders are small figures seeking only short-term tactical gain.

Double imprisonment

A French friend forwarded to me the recent newsletter of a French violinist, Mathilde Vittu, who has been teaching music in the West Bank. She writes of watching Palestinian children emerging from her lessons, violins on their backs, being surrounded by Israeli soldiers trying to provoke them. She goes to Gaza and observes the “double imprisonment” constituted by Israel and “the rules of Hamas”.

In a makeshift conservatory, partially destroyed, hit by power cuts in the midst of Bach piano solos, she speaks of her “indescribable emotion” at a magical final concert where she is thanked “for liberating us for an evening through music”.

One talented violinist, aged 14, tells her he plans to stop playing after his exam to become a “martyr” after the death of his best friend in the West Bank. She is deeply troubled; then locals tell her lots of kids in Gaza have that ambition at 14, only to think better of it.

Yifrach, Khdeir, Fraenkel, Shaar: will their deaths serve any purpose? I doubt it. – (The New York Times)

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